evolution
oracknows | June 16, 2007I must confess that I never really grokked the whole "LOL Cat" thing. I must admit to being a bit puzzled by the phenomenon when it metastasized to ScienceBlogs and some of my fellow SBers applied it to creationists, spurred on by Mark H at denialism.com (althogh I must admit that I nonetheless found the first entry in this post to be particularly amusing).
I should have known that it wouldn't be long before the phenomenon attacked one of my favorite SF/fantasy shows of all time, Doctor Who. So, here they are, LOL Doctor Who Cat Macros. A few that I found amusing are below the fold…
pharyngula | June 14, 2007This site has its heart in the right place, but it's more for theistic evolutionists than my kind—all the bowing and scraping to a creator god leaves me cold (especially since it seems to substitute hearty encouragement and reconciliation over actually discussing the evidence). But if that doesn't bother you, take a look at The Epic of Evolution. It'll probably make somebody happy.
grrlscientist | June 13, 2007tags: behavior, evolution, humans, mate choice
A recent study has found a strong correlation between a woman's choice of a partner and her relationship with her father. Basically, the better she was treated by her father when she was a child, the more closely that her partner's face resembled her dad's.
The team's leader, Lynda Boothroyd from Durham University in the UK, said that her findings add to our understanding of how we become attracted to certain types of people. Such knowledge could have important implications for fields such as relationship counselling, she added.
In this study,…
razib | June 13, 2007New Scientist has a short story synthesizing all the accumulating data that Neandertals weren't that primitive, and that the inflection point of cultural creativity 40-50 K BP was the culmination of a gradual process.
grrlscientist | June 13, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, dinosaur, bird, fossil, Gigantoraptor erlianensis, China
An artist's painting of the newly discovered Gigantoraptor dinosaur, depicted with other smaller dinosaurs. Fossilized bones uncovered in the Erlian Basin of northern China's Inner Mongolia region show the Gigantoraptor erlianensis was about 26 feet in length and weighed 3,000 pounds. The discovery of the giant, birdlike dinosaur indicates a more complicated evolutionary process for birds than originally thought.
Image: Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology & Paleoanthropology (Beijing, China) [larger…
oracknows | June 13, 2007Yesterday, I discussed how pseudoscience--nay, antiscience--may well triumph over science in the Autism Omnibus trial presently going on. One reason that this might happen is because of the primacy of feelings over evidence among the plaintiffs, to whose power even the Special Masters running the trial are not entirely immune. As a fellow human being, I can somewhat understand this tendency in the parents of autistic children. After all, the parent-child bond is one of the strongest there is, making it difficult for even the most rationalistic parent to think clearly when it comes to their…
evolvingthoughts | June 12, 2007
Marc Ereshfsky's entry on "Species" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has been updated, though not to remove the classic "Essentialism Story" that has been called into question by a number of scholars lately. Under the fold, I will quote Marc's comments and critique them. [I can do this because Marc is a hell of a nice guy, and not at all precious about such stuff, at least not so far. I will test him, though. I should stress that Marc is not the originator of the Essentialist Story - it was developed between 1958 or so and 1982 largely by Mayr.]
Since Aristotle, species have been…
oracknows | June 12, 2007Many of my fellow SBers have blogged about the Gallup poll showing just how scientifically ignorant Americans, and in particular Republicans, are:
PRINCETON, NJ -- The majority of Republicans in the United States do not believe the theory of evolution is true and do not believe that humans evolved over millions of years from less advanced forms of life. This suggests that when three Republican presidential candidates at a May debate stated they did not believe in evolution, they were generally in sync with the bulk of the rank-and-file Republicans whose nomination they are seeking to obtain.…
evolvingthoughts | June 11, 2007
So the record for the "world's largest organism" has again been claimed for a fungus, something Stephen Jay Gould wrote about in his wonderfully titled essay "A Humongous Fungus Among Us" back in 1992, and which was included in his volume A Dinosaur in a Haystack.
The previous fungus, Armillaria gallica, is now replaced by a related mushroom stand, Armillaria ostoyae, in Oregon's Blue Mountains. But I have my doubts. The term "organism" here has a meaning rather different to "relatively undifferentiated mass of related stands". In fact, I want to talk about the notion of an organism, and…
clock | June 10, 2007The best coverage of the paper so far:
Neurophilosophy
Pharyngula
Lab Notes
Dispatches from the Culture Wars
grrlscientist | June 9, 2007tags: evolution, creationism, Gallup Poll
I read the results of the most recent Gallup/USA Today poll of 1007 Americans, asking them about evolution and creationism. Not only was it appalling to see how many supposedly intelligent people indulge themselves by believing in the hocus-pocus of creationism, but further, I was confused by the results from two conflicting questions (below the fold), making me wonder how stupid is the average American?
These conflicting questions and their responses;
Do you think evolution, that is, the idea that human beings developed over millions of years from…
evolvingthoughts | June 8, 2007
This is the last section I will discuss in detail. It is, of course, the story of Cain and Abel. Cain is a farmer, and Abel is a herdsman. Both of these are agrarian pursuits, in the new agricultural period. But YHWH (just the single name now) seems to value meat more than crops, for when Abel brings him an offering, YHWH treats it with respect (sha'ah, meaning to gaze upon), but not Cain's. Since YHWH is still around chatting to the folk, he is still a physical deity, so I guess he needs his meat. His greens, not so much.
After Cain does the deed of murdering his brother in jealousy (…
clock | June 7, 2007A paper in press in Current Biology (press release here) looks at mitochondrial DNA of mammoths and advances a primarily environmental cause for the mammoth extinction. Razib explains why such a black-and-white dichotomy is unhealthy.
Looking at a different hypothesis, also environmental, for the mammoth extinction (comet impact), Archy places the black-and-white dichotomy in the historical context and tries to figure out why the environmental hypotheses are so popular nowadays, while extinction at the hands of human hunters is not a popular idea any more.
evolvingthoughts | June 7, 2007
Schadenfreude , n. Pleasure found in the misfortunes of Answers in Genesis, who employed a pornography actor to play Adam. Well, at least it makes sense - didn't Adam and Eve fall because they had sex? I'm sure some Baptist told me that once...
pharyngula | June 7, 2007No, actually they don't — but they do have some proteins that are essential components of synapses, and it tells us something important about the evolution of the nervous system. A new paper by Sakarya et al. really isn't particularly revolutionary, but it is very interesting, and it does confirm something many of us suspected.
First, in case you don't know what I'm talking about, here's a synapse:
A synapse is a kind of gateway for the transmission of electrical impulses in the nervous system. What's portrayed above is the terminal of a generic neuron; electrical signals travel down from…
razib | June 7, 2007There is a new paper in Current Biology, Genetic Structure and Extinction of the Woolly Mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius. The authors use recovered mitochondrial DNA (passed through the female lineage) to reconstruct the phylogeographic history of the species. It seems to me that the abstract is a bit more cryptic than it needs to me, but Eureka Alert has the meat of their paper in the form of a few quotes:
"In combination with the results on other species, a picture is emerging of extinction not as a sudden event at the end of the last ice age, but as a piecemeal process over tens of…
mikethemadbiologist | June 7, 2007I like much of Matt Yglesias' writing. But he still doesn't appreciate how science and evolution affect public policy issues. As many of you know, three out of ten Republican presidential candidates stated that they don't believe in evolution at one of the presidential debates. Yglesias comments on Huckabee's response:
I see that Jamie Kirchick didn't care for the reply at all: "Sorry, but if someone believes in fairy tales, I think that's pretty relevant to their qualifications as president." But why? The core of Huckabee's answer is here:
It's interesting that that question would even…
oracknows | June 6, 2007Date: June 4, 2007, 2 PM CDST
Place: University of Chicago's bookstore
Depressing. At what is supposed to be a bastion of science, we find Michael Behe's latest tripe on the same bookshelves as Stephen Jay Gould's books (see the shelf below). On the other hand, Creatures of Accident looks potentially interesting.
Still, I'm disappointed that this book isn't in the philosophy or religion section--where it belongs.
oracknows | June 6, 2007Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that it's been quite a while since I've featured the antics of a certain character who's become a bit of the bête noire of my fellow surgeons. I'm referring, of course, to Dr. Michael Egnor, a renowned neurosurgeon from SUNY Stony Brook who's made 2007 a very embarrassing year indeed for surgeons like me who accept evolution as a valid scientific theory, as, in fact, the entire underpinning of modern biological and medical sciences. Starting back in March, having whetted his appetite for looking foolish by jumping into the comments of a posts in…
evolvingthoughts | June 6, 2007
In this post, I want to propose my own view, or rather the views I have come to accept, about the nature of science.
[Part 1; Part 2]
There are three major phases in the philosophical view of science. The first was around in the nineteenth century - science is the use of inductive logic based on data to draw conclusions about the laws of nature. Thick books described this in detail, and they are still worth reading, in particular a book by W. Stanley Jevons, The Principles of Science, published in the 1870s. But induction, as anyone who has studied Hume knows, is problematic. You simply…